It’s Night in America
Ana Vaz
Curated by Daniel Ribas
Opening on 4th Jul at 19:00
Until 7th Oct
EA Exhibition Hall
Free Entrance

A Garden in the City
(about It’s Night in America)

We look at a horizon: we are in the plateau that hosts Brasília, the utopian city built to be the capital of modern Brazil.
The images are striking, almost sculptural in beauty: as if a city had been gradually shaped by the hands of a superman.
This modernity is part of a history and an imaginary of a future never attained, of a nation-building project never fulfilled. What remains of this project is a history of winners. A history that conceals the memory of the forgotten and the precarious; a history of elite power over a people, on behalf of whom a city was built.
In fact, the idea of the city is one of the starting points for this story of ecoterror: the impossible confrontation between a prior existence and what the city devastates.

Structured in three screens that envelop the visitor, It’s Night in America by Ana Vaz promises an adventure where this city—so central to the filmmaker’s work—meets an alternative life, one that exists beyond the daily hustle.
A life of captive animals, animals rescued from their reckless entry into the city.
The exhibition places us, initially, in a space of strangeness, which repeats itself multiple times: strange, alien sounds evoking references from horror films to unsettle the visitor.
We are in a space that takes us away from the familiar, from the everyday city life.
Sounds of pots also point to a political space—the noise against the city’s government (Brasília as the capital) and the violent spaces it has constructed.
Sounds that refer to political dystopia, both contemporary and historical.

We depart from that dystopia toward the night, on the edge of visibility, playing with the sensitivity to light (or its lack) of the expired film Ana Vaz uses.
This physical side—made of discarded materials—strengthens the intent to place the visitor in a liminal space, a space of doubts and contradictions, but also a space open to something new: to a future of nature and its existence.
The expired film reinforces the somberness imposed by the city: with its vague lights, the glaring reds of cars, the torrential rain—with its storms and thunders—and a sense of entering a noir film.
The camera (in vigilant unease) seems to be searching for some clue amidst the feverish everyday of the early evening (the moment when, due to lack of visibility, we are forced to face the unknown).
It is a camera that sometimes follows the road, like a road movie, wandering incessantly.
What is this camera searching for?
The labyrinthine city unfolds before us: a concrete city, a car city, that assaults the human scale, just as it had previously assaulted those who contributed to its construction.

In this desolate vision, we are surprised by the animals, who recklessly invade the city.
We see them wandering the streets or already rescued, living in Brasília's Zoological Garden.
The images of these animals are striking: as if we sense the sadness in their eyes, a restlessness that also conveys a certain despair, a mismatch between them and the city-utopia.
These are images of a lack of affection: they are always surrounded by bars or protective barriers.
The men who rescue or care for them are always protected; some of them seem almost military, and this appearance subtly hints at the war these images place us in. A silent, minimal war, where the winners are clear.

There is, however, a suggestion of a kind of blow—and it is here that It’s Night in America shifts, transforms: in the impressive, giant images of an owl, which faces the camera directly, challenging the visitor and their gaze.
At that moment, the installation’s device surrounds the visitor, not allowing them to escape this reprimanding blow.
The soundtrack by Guilherme Vaz returns here, punctuating the film several times.
It is an intense, mysterious, imposing track, just like the owl’s gaze that interrogates us.

Intermittently, the installation is interrupted by regular blue screens, while the city is filmed on the cusp of twilight.
The American Night (a cinematographic technique that allows filming during the day to appear as night) is transformed into the night of America, a dystopian film about the abyss of the city-utopia in the void of contemporaneity.
What will remain after the end of the world?